kinz craze!

i can only imagine that a few of you parents out there are shaking your heads sadly at the title of this post. you know, all too well, the fury that is webkinz. it's the phenomenon sweeping the nation, selling out stores, and causing a frenzy in the elementary-school set, much the way that beanie babies did in the last decade.

here's the deal: you buy the small plush animal for an exorbitant price. regular sized webkinz are not much larger than a beanie baby and cost between $12 and $15. their smaller cousins, the little kinz, cost $11- $13. OH! that is unless it's a hard-to-find kinz, then you'll pay out the nose for it on ebay.

next, you find the code on the tag secured to the webkinz' leg. you enter the code at the webkinz website and "adopt" your pet into the webkinz world. then, and only then, can you be a part of the webkinz mystique.

once into the online webkinz world, your adopted and named pet gets his or her own room to decorate. for this you need kinzcash, and there are several different ways to earn kinzcash on the site. the easiest way is to play arcade games or answer trivia questions. other ways include gem hunting or "caring" for your pet by clicking a button that proclaims you care.

you can also dress your pet, make it do specific movements, garden, bathe, and take your pet to the doctor. there are chat rooms decked out to look like pool halls and playgrounds where you can "chat" using a set number of pre-approved phrases. you can find your friends' pets, and invite them to your house, or challenge them to a tournament.

my kids, as well as all the other kids on the bus, are simply gaga over webkinz. it takes my kids almost a month to save up the allowance to buy a new one, and they patiently bide their time until they have the cold, hard cash in hand. then we go on a hunt to find the little critters. the dilemma then is WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE? and WHAT TO NAME IT? it's so engrossing and important to these kids. and they must go on the website every day to care for their virtual pets. they've even worked out petsitting deals with kids who will be out-of-town.

it's craziness, the likes of which i remember from the cabbage patch frenzy i experienced as a kid. i keep thinking, "this too shall pass," but i'm afraid it will be around a whole lot longer before it passes. i'll keep you updated!

tedium, tedium

yesterday afternoon, i helped h put together his lego bionicle playset. that is, if by "helped" you mean "put the whole thing together while child and kittens fiddled with the plastic bits." have ANY of you taken on a large scale lego project in your lives? it is eye-straining, back-spasming tedium. i've put together piles and piles of the actual bionicle robots, they're very easy and very playable once they're built. you can even take them apart and interchange the parts into your own cool new robot creation! wow. but this playset, this was a whole different story. there were about 15 little plastic baggies in the set, each filled with a few hundred shiny, colorful lego building blocks in diffrent sizes and shapes. what they don't tell you on the exterior of the package is that THERE IS ONLY ONE OF THE PIECE YOU NEED, and that YOU HAVE TO FIND IT AMONG THE 20,000 OTHER PIECES.

oh, honestly. h was trying to help me find the appropriate piece per the instructions, if by "trying" you mean messing around with the kittens. usually i could find what i needed, but occasionally it would take 10 minutes to locate the small, flat, red, square, four-nubbed piece necessary to build the ENTIRE rest of the structure. one time, i asked h to go upstairs and get his basic box of legos so i could substitute an unfound piece, and he said, "i'm too sick!" my reply? "then i'm too sick to build the rest of this castle!" (i'm not normally so snotty, but this was after at least 3 hours of legoing. my patience was running thin.) he slunk off the chair and plodded, head down, toward the stairs when i shouted, "FOUND IT!" boy, was he relieved not to put in the effort of 14 stairsteps.

the end result was... i would use the word "breathtaking..." but it was really just underwhelming. all that work? all those itty bitty pieces? for THIS?! h enjoyed playing with the built set until it slowly began to fall apart from playing with it. that's right, folks, FALL APART. from PLAYING. with a TOY. then orion knocked over the towers. then it was bedtime.

it's still on the kitchen table today, and my question is, what to do with it? i can semi-dismantle it and place it in a box, but will it ever again be rebuilt? will it get played with in a semi-built mode? will it crumble into it's original state of a zillion pieces disconnected? but most importantly... what was the point?